Hero
The Triumph of Style over Content – Zhang Yimou’s HERO
Two years after its release in China, where it was a smash hit, the sub-titled version of Zhang Yimou’s Hero has finally been released in the US and Australia by Buena Vista (the distribution arm of Disney Productions) and Miramax, under the patronage of Quentin Tarantino. The most expensive production ever mounted in China, it features thousands of extras, star casting and stunning cinematography. China’s leading martial arts star, Jet Li, plays the leading role of Nameless; well-known stars of the Hong Kong cinema, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, who featured as the lovers of In the Mood for Love, play the lovers Broken Sword and Snow; and Australian-born Christopher Doyle, a regular member of Wong Kar Wai’s creative team, is responsible for the cinematography.
The story is another version of The Emperor and the Assassin, Chen Kaige’s historical epic, which told how the Qin (aka Yin or Chin) Emperor brutally suppressed and occupied the warring states of ancient China, unified the nation under his rule, and survived assassination attempts by Zhao dissidents. In Zhang Yimou’s version, the Emperor’s ruthless treatment of regional lands, peoples and rights is glossed over; he focuses on the exploits of, and dissension between, the small group of would-be assassins. The dissident politics disappears in an ultimate affirmation of national imperialism – to the dismay of many critics in Taiwan, Singapore and the US. Both the Taipei Times and the Straits Times attacked the film’s whitewashing of Qin’s legacy and its national-imperialist polemics. Critics in the US magazine, The New Republic, deemed it “a beautiful film that makes a truly ugly argument”, and a hymn of praise to “the biggest hero of them all: the almighty state”, while Jim Hoberman in the Village Voice went so far as to compare the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s celebration of Nazi ideology, Triumph of the Will.
These critics are treating the film as a history lesson, if not a political tract, while it is really just a glorious spectacle, an ultra-glamorous martial arts movie, with the Chinese equivalent of a Hays code ending. It is more like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than The Emperor and the Assassin. The narrative construction also betrays a debt to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in the way that various characters give variant versions of events in flashback, producing confusion about what really happened. In the end, though, what happens is less significant than how it is shown, for the film represents the triumph of style over content – to borrow the verdict of my friend, Quentin Turnour, an AFI researcher and Cinemateque stalwart.
The film is ravishingly, breathtakingly beautiful – a tour-de-force of colour-coded costume and set design, brilliantly highlighting the colours red, blue, green and white, in turn. The richly colorful fabrics of robes, flags and curtains billow, float and fall in graceful, sensuous slow-motion. Balletic bodies defy gravity in dazzling displays of high-speed and (more often) slow-motion movement through air and water. Spectacular natural settings - deserts, mountains, lakes - are viewed in luscious long shots. Certain set-pieces stand out - the sight of thousands of arrows in flight; myriads of swirling golden autumn leaves finally turning blood red - but the film as a whole is a visual feast.
The martial arts are not just glamorized and poeticized through the consummate artistry of the costume and set design, the glorious natural settings and the stunning cinematography. They are also elevated to the highest level of art by association with other traditional arts much prized by Chinese mandarins and connoisseurs – musicianship and calligraphy. The first duel, between Nameless (Jet Li) and Sky (Donnie Yen), is literally accompanied by a master musician on a stringed instrument, and the dialogue expressly asserts that the two arts (martial arts and music) share common elements. Broken Sword (Tony Leung) is not just a master of martial arts but also a practitioner of calligraphy who is hiding out with his lover, Snow (Maggie Cheung) and apprentice, Moon (Zhang Ziji), in a calligraphy school. Once again, explicit connections are made between the two arts. In the school, calligraphy is practiced with wooden sticks on sand, and, on one occasion only, with a brush dipped in red paint. When Broken Sword abandons the dissident cause and opts for national peace and unity, he employs his sword as a pen, or a calligraphy stick, and writes his message in the sandy ground. The old master of the calligraphy school had proposed that the pen (writing/the word) is mightier than the sword – and now Broken Sword turns his sword into a pen.
The stars in this film do not produce memorable dramatic performances. In In the Mood for Love, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung contributed moving performances but here they come across more like mannequins in a fashion shoot than passionate and conflicted lovers; Jet Li is quite wooden; Zhang Ziji alone gives a spirited performance. But it doesn’t matter, because both Zhang Yimou and Chris Doyle are masters of cinematographic art and put all the drama in the camera work. They are more interested in the jewel-like drips of raindrops, the ominous flickering of candles, the deadly flight and fall of arrows, the swoops and flights of bodies in movement, the dramatic expressionism of vibrant colours, and the sinuous billowing of curtains, garments and long hair in the breeze, than in any human drama.
Freda Freiberg